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Monday, June 10, 2013

I spent last Saturday at Rakkasah's Spring Caravan, a belly dance festival with a particular focus on
fusion, where I danced as a guest artist. I saw plenty of great dancing, although, as usual, some of the
fusion pieces were more coherent than others. But never mind what I don't like. I'm very sympathetic to the
fact that artistic risk sometimes results in artistic failure. Ars
longa, vita brevis, and it is better to have tried. Except, okay, I
do want to say one thing: people, enough with the all-black
costumes. Especially in this venue, where the lighting is
not very sophisticated, you just turn into an indistinct flat smudge. You do
yourself a real disservice by making your movements very hard to see,
or, in the case of those of you who don't dance so well to start
with, you put all of the focus on your weird stiff claw hands. I
know you want to be “dark” and “alternative,” but texture and
contrast really help to keep things interesting. Thanks for
listening. I'm done now.

I have not been feeling up to working
on anything new lately, so for my performance I pulled two pieces out
of repertoire: a new-ish drum solo, and “Dream Waltz” from 2010.
There's existing video for both of these pieces, but—and I kind of
hate to say this—I think this new video is better in terms of the
quality of my dancing. Both previous videos were just done straight
to the camera, and I think the stark terror inspiration of dancing
for a live audience really helped me to access a deeper-than-usual
state of mindfulness. And the balance of this audience in particular
was ideally inspiring, with a mix of fans and old friends at whom I
wanted to beam love, new friends on whom I wanted to make a good
impression, new-to-the-scene people who are learning more about belly dance to whom I
wanted to show something exceptional, and, [sigh], [eye roll], a
handful of determinedly unimpressed, aloof, and tiresome frenemies
for whose benefit I always take a special satisfaction in unflappably
dancing very, very well.

Vainglorious belly dancers gonna derogate. I have this potato design on one of my favorite t-shirts. One of
its interesting features is that no one over age 50 can understand
it. Illustration by Sarah Aquino.

Another positive factor, although it
may not sound like such a big deal, was having a wooden floor. I
dance on wood in my workspace at home, where I do the majority of my
choreography and rehearsal, and adjusting to the higher-friction
marley that's in most of the studios/stages where I film is always a
compromise. Often, half of my attention is lost to compensating for sticky flooring tugging on my feet. Being able to flow and
glide through steps in the way they were designed made me feel very comfortable on stage and really let me relax
in a way many performance venues do not afford.

The drum solo follows below. If you
follow this blog or my YouTube page, you may recognize the
choreography from a video published in April. But, as I said, to my
chagrin, I think this performance is better. Also, take a moment to
appreciate that this is realtime, full-frame, uncut footage. I
know that a lot of people respond more to atmosphere than content, so
I really appreciate the beautiful camerawork and editing on the
previous (multi-camera) video of this choreography, but I also take
personal pride in demonstrating that it really looks like this in
real life, with no secret blunders hidden by cleverly timed cut-aways.
(Another person who notably felt this way was Fred Astaire, who
specified in the terms of his contract that his dances be shown
as-is, with no edits.)

A few years ago I was
trying to build steam behind the idea of “Cabaret Fusion.” You
know, like Tribal Fusion, except building from an Oriental movement
vocabulary rather than ATS. But a bunch of people told me that the
parallel was not immediately obvious to them and that the language
didn't really make sense because cabaret and Oriental styles are
already fusions. But if, hypothetically, there were “Cabaret
Fusion,” I think Dream Waltz is what it would look like: sexy fantasy
revisionist-retro, but with chiffon instead of combat boots. Really unimpeachably technically sharp, but with more glitter and less glitch.
Is there any way I can make this a trend? Another of my Cabaret
Fusion pieces, Raqs Europa, has the dubious distinction of being my
least-watched YouTube video, leading me to believe this is just not
in the zeitgeist. But if any one is vaguely on board, would you
please get in touch?

About Me

I’m a dancer, choreographer, class instructor, and traveling workshop presenter, specializing in artistic belly dance. My work on appears on the DVD Beautiful Technique from Step One as well as several other instructional, reference, and performance programs. My full dance bio is here.